Repurposing Today’s Medicines for Longevity

Picture a pharmacy shelf. On it sit a diabetes pill that costs four dollars a month, an injection that melts away weight, a cholesterol shot given twice a year, and a small daily tablet prescribed for erections. Each was approved for one disease. Each is now being taken by healthy people who hope it will slow aging itself. This is the most serious frontier in longevity, because these are real drugs with real trials behind them. It is also where the gap between “proven for the sick” and “proven for the well” is easiest to overlook.

Clinical scenes in this edition are explicitly labeled illustrations. They describe imagined situations used to explain medical decisions, not documented patients, diagnoses, conversations, or treatment outcomes. They should not be read as evidence that a particular intervention works. Personal recollections are recollections, not medical records.